Bonhag’s short, thick ears tingled. This was the kind of talk he liked to hear. “I can fix anything like that, Mr. Cowperwood,”
he replied, servilely. “You leave it to me. If there’s any one you want to see at any time, just let me know. Of course I have to be very careful, and so do you, but that’s all right, too. If you want to stay out in that yard a little longer in the mornings or get out there afternoons or evenings, from now on, why, go ahead.
It’s all right. I’ll just leave the door open. If the warden or anybody else should be around, I’ll just scratch on your door with my key, and you come in and shut it. If there’s anything you want from the outside I can get it for you—jelly or eggs or butter or any little thing like that. You might like to fix up your meals a little that way.”
“I’m certainly most grateful, Mr. Bonhag,” returned Cowperwood in his grandest manner, and with a desire to smile, but he kept a straight face.
“In regard to that other matter,” went on Bonhag, referring to the matter of extra visitors, “I can fix that any time you want to. I know the men out at the gate. If you want anybody to come here, just write ‘em a note and give it to me, and tell ‘em to ask for me when they come. That’ll get ‘em in all right. When they get here you can talk to ‘em in your cell. See! Only when I tap they have to come out. You want to remember that. So just you let me know.”
Cowperwood was exceedingly grateful. He said so in direct, choice language. It occurred to him at once that this was Aileen’s opportunity, and that he could now notify her to come. If she veiled herself sufficiently she would probably be safe enough.
He decided to write her, and when Wingate came he gave him a letter to mail.
Two days later, at three o’clock in the afternoon—the time appointed by him—Aileen came to see him. She was dressed in gray broadcloth with white-velvet trimmings and cut-steel buttons which glistened like silver, and wore, as additional ornaments, as well as a protection against the cold, a cap, stole, and muff of snow-white ermine. Over this rather striking costume she had slipped a long dark circular cloak, which she meant to lay off immediately upon her arrival. She had made a very careful toilet as to her shoes, gloves, hair, and the gold ornaments which she wore. Her face was concealed by a thick green veil, as Cowperwood had suggested; and she arrived at an hour when, as near as he had been able to prearrange, he would be alone. Wingate usually came at four, after business, and Steger in the morning, when he came at all.
She was very nervous over this strange adventure, leaving the streetcar in which she had chosen to travel some distance away and walking up a side street. The cold weather and the gray walls under a gray sky gave her a sense of defeat, but she had worked very hard to look nice in order to cheer her lover up. She knew how readily he responded to the influence of her beauty when properly displayed.
Cowperwood, in view of her coming, had made his cell as acceptable as possible. It was clean, because he had swept it himself and made his own bed; and besides he had shaved and combed his hair, and otherwise put himself to rights. The caned chairs on which he was working had been put in the corner at the end of the bed.
His few dishes were washed and hung up, and his clogs brushed with a brush which he now kept for the purpose. Never before, he thought to himself, with a peculiar feeling of artistic degradation, had Aileen seen him like this. She had always admired his good taste in clothes, and the way he carried himself in them; and now she was to see him in garments which no dignity of body could make presentable. Only a stoic sense of his own soul-dignity aided him here. After all, as he now thought, he was Frank A. Cowperwood, and that was something, whatever he wore. And Aileen knew it.
Again, he might be free and rich some day, and he knew that she believed that. Best of all, his looks under these or any other circumstances, as he knew, would make no difference to Aileen.
She would only love him the more. It was her ardent sympathy that he was afraid of. He was so glad that Bonhag had suggested that she might enter the cell, for it would be a grim procedure talking to her through a barred door.
When Aileen arrived she asked for Mr. Bonhag, and was permitted to go to the central rotunda, where he was sent for. When he came she murmured: “I wish to see Mr. Cowperwood, if you please”; and he exclaimed, “Oh, yes, just come with me.” As he came across the rotunda floor from his corridor he was struck by the evident youth of Aileen, even though he could not see her face. This now was something in accordance with what he had expected of Cowperwood.
A man who could steal five hundred thousand dollars and set a whole city by the ears must have wonderful adventures of all kinds, and Aileen looked like a true adventure. He led her to the little room where he kept his desk and detained visitors, and then bustled down to Cowperwood’s cell, where the financier was working on one of his chairs and scratching on the door with his key, called: “There’s a young lady here to see you. Do you want to let her come inside?”
“Thank you, yes,” replied Cowperwood; and Bonhag hurried away, unintentionally forgetting, in his boorish incivility, to unlock the cell door, so that he had to open it in Aileen’s presence.
The long corridor, with its thick doors, mathematically spaced gratings and graystone pavement, caused Aileen to feel faint at heart. A prison, iron cells! And he was in one of them. It chilled her usually courageous spirit. What a terrible place for her Frank to be! What a horrible thing to have put him here! Judges, juries, courts, laws, jails seemed like so many foaming ogres ranged about the world, glaring down upon her and her love-affair.
The clank of the key in the lock, and the heavy outward swinging of the door, completed her sense of the untoward. And then she saw Cowperwood.
Because of the price he was to receive, Bonhag, after admitting her, strolled discreetly away. Aileen looked at Cowperwood from behind her veil, afraid to speak until she was sure Bonhag had gone. And Cowperwood, who was retaining his self-possession by an effort, signaled her but with difficulty after a moment or two.
“It’s all right,” he said. “He’s gone away.” She lifted her veil, removed her cloak, and took in, without seeming to, the stuffy, narrow thickness of the room, his wretched shoes, the cheap, misshapen suit, the iron door behind him leading out into the little yard attached to his cell. Against such a background, with his partially caned chairs visible at the end of the bed, he seemed unnatural, weird even. Her Frank! And in this condition.
She trembled and it was useless for her to try to speak. She could only put her arms around him and stroke his head, murmuring: “My poor boy—my darling. Is this what they have done to you? Oh, my poor darling.” She held his head while Cowperwood, anxious to retain his composure, winced and trembled, too. Her love was so full—so genuine. It was so soothing at the same time that it was unmanning, as now he could see, making of him a child again. And for the first time in his life, some inexplicable trick of chemistry—
that chemistry of the body, of blind forces which so readily supersedes reason at times—he lost his self-control. The depth of Aileen’s feelings, the cooing sound of her voice, the velvety tenderness of her hands, that beauty that had drawn him all the time—more radiant here perhaps within these hard walls, and in the face of his physical misery, than it had ever been before—
completely unmanned him. He did not understand how it could; he tried to defy the moods, but he could not. When she held his head close and caressed it, of a sudden, in spite of himself, his breast felt thick and stuffy, and his throat hurt him. He felt, for him, an astonishingly strange feeling, a desire to cry, which he did his best to overcome; it shocked him so. There then combined and conspired to defeat him a strange, rich picture of the great world he had so recently lost, of the lovely, magnificent world which he hoped some day to regain. He felt more poignantly at this moment than ever he had before the degradation of the clog shoes, the cotton shirt, the striped suit, the reputation of a convict, permanent and not to be laid aside. He drew himself quickly away from her, turned his back, clinched his hands, drew his muscles taut; but it was too late. He was crying, and he could not stop.